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Jonathan Bach

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Bio:

Jonathan Bach is Chair of the interdisciplinary Global Studies program and Associate Professor of International Affairs at The New School in New York.

Bach received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the Maxwell School, Syracuse University and has held post-doctoral fellowships at Columbia University (ISERP) and Harvard University (Center for European Studies), where he was also a faculty affiliate 2010-2012, and visiting positions at Brown University’s Watson Institute, Columbia University, the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies in Berlin, and the Institute for Peace Research and Security Studies at the University of Hamburg. He was previously the Associate Director of the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School. Bach is a faculty affiliate at Columbia University’s Center on Organizational Innovation and the New School’s Department of Anthropology.

Research:

Jonathan Bach's work explores the intersection of culture and politics, with a focus on how micro-level practices reformulate received notions of sovereignty, space, and identity. Recent research concerns material culture and the legacy of socialism in united Germany, the role of “urban villages” in the growth of the Chinese city of Shenzhen, and the evolution of special economic zones as an urban logic. His work draws from anthropology, sociology and political science.

Selected publications:

He has written on information technology and organizational change, labor migration and citizenship, and political theory. His articles have appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Theory, Culture & Society, Cultural Politics, Public Culture, Studies in Comparative and International Development, and Geopolitics, among others, and he is the author of Between Sovereignty and Integration: German Foreign Policy and National Identity after 1989. Current projects include co-editing the volume Learning from Shenzhen: China's Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City (with Mary Ann O’Donnell and Winnie Wong) and a book manuscript entitled Materiality and Memory: Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany.